Black script lettering reading Pain is just a simple compromise, ending with a small butterfly, across a forearm.

Script quote and butterfly on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the words Pain is just a simple compromise written in black cursive script. A small solid black butterfly sits at the right end of the line, near the wrist. The ink is black and grey only, with clean, even lettering against the skin, and the subject fills the width of the frame over a dark background.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Butterfly Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the wind up here has teeth and it likes the young ones best. You see that broken arch with the ivy growing out of it? Half of it fell the winter the old lord died, and the other half is still standing only because a miller's daughter named Hild made a bargain with the thing that lived beneath the mill race.

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Her brother had been caught under the great wheel, and his leg hung wrong below the knee. Hild went down to the black water with a loaf and a tallow candle, because that is what you bring to such things. The thing that rose up was grey as wet slate and it had no face to speak of, only a long patient mouth. It said it could mend the boy, every bone of him, if she gave it something of equal weight. She offered her sleep. She offered her hearing and her good name and the blue ribbon in her hair. The thing shook its head at each one, the way a merchant does with a poor coin. Then she asked what it would take, and it said, "Pain is just a simple compromise, girl. Someone must carry the weight of the mending, and you have strong shoulders."

So she agreed. Her brother walked again by Lammas. Hild, though, began to feel every hurt that came to anyone in the valley. A stubbed toe in the next parish, a fever in the far farms, the sharp grief of a widow she had never met. It all came to her, and it all went out of her again, carried off on pale wings. The people said the chapel sill was always dusted with white on those mornings, and that a single butterfly sat there, folding its wings, so that the hurt had somewhere small to rest.

That butterfly still lands on the wall, and it is the reason the ruin is quiet at dusk. Now, which of you has a scraped knee? Come here, let me look. Hold still, it will only sting a little, and I promise nobody here is asking you to pay for it.